Take two cups of self-rising flour and sift in dry a scant teaspoon of baking soda. Add 1/3 cup cold vegetable shortening, and mix thoroughly with your fingers until granular.
Working quickly, stir in enough chilled buttermilk to make a sticky dough. Throw this dough out on a generously-floured surface, sprinkle with a scant more flour and knead once or twice, no more than enough to make a manageable mass. Roll out thick, about half an inch, and, using a sharp edge, cut into large rounds, at least 3″. Again, work quickly so that the dough doesn’t get warm; the soda has to work in the oven.
Place the biscuits–just touching–in a lightly greased skillet or thick metal pan. Pop them into a very hot oven for about a quarter an hour until golden-brown and fragrant. Brush with butter while hot.
This recipe comes from Dr. Billie Baker Swift. I received it a few years ago, but somehow lost it among a lot of other messages, and I’m only now getting around to posting it. I’ve also lost track with Billie, so if any of you know her, please tag her for me.
I first met LW while working my way through school and working at the Abbey’s Irish Rose. L.W. and his friend Sean were often at the Abbey and I believe they were working on Master’s Degrees in English. As time and my education progressed, I ended up working as a bartender in most of the everchanging bars in Oxford; Beth Munday and I were the only females working as bartenders at that time.
Eventually I ended up at the Warehouse (I think the Peddler by then) with LW., where he perfected this Bloody Mary mix. We made this mix 2 or 3 times a week. It makes a mildly spicy mix which can be kicked up with more Tabasco for those who prefer it that way. Our measuring cups were bar glasses, highball glasses, the type for gin and tonics, probably 12 oz.; I’ll leave it to you to come up with exact measurements. This makes a large quantity, and refrigerates well, a week at least.
Combine 2 large (46 oz.) cans of V-8 juice with 1/3 a highball glass (see above) each lemon juice and Tabasco (@ 4 oz,, jly) and 1/2 a glass of Worcestershire sauce (@ 8 oz. jlyi). Shake well. We garnished with whatever was handy; celery; lemons; pearl onions and olives. These days I would put bacon on the garnish.
When November comes, hunters up and down the Mississippi flyway flock to the wild with guns and dogs. In the Mississippi Delta, arguably the heart of the flyway, men of a certain feather abandon their usual nests of domesticity for camp, in Irwin Hester’s case his duck camp on Concordia Island in Bolivar County.
“It’s not really an island,” Irwin said. “If anything, it’s a peninsula, since the river makes a tight loop around it.” He looked out the window at the sunset spread out over Arkansas. “You’d think they’d have a special name for a riparian peninsula, but they don’t.”
Irwin retired from what he calls “the oil business” almost a decade ago. He received his degree in geology from Mississippi State in the early 70s and began working with Gulf Oil, stayed with them through the merger, and remained, working his way up the ladder, eventually landing in Pittsburgh at U-PARK.
An only child, Irwin never married (“Just too damned busy,” he explained). When he retired in 2012, he came back home to Mississippi, made a home, renewed old friendships, and moved his folks’ old home to the end of a dirt road on Concordia Island. Twice a year, the beginning of duck season and the end, November and January, he holds camp.
“I make real, Texas-style chili,” Irwin said. “It’s the best, and once you’ve had it, you’ll never call anything else chili. I learned to make it when I lived in Austin. I knew a guy who cooked it at his hunt camp up on the Pedernales River. He said he got his recipe from Lady Bird Johnson herself.
Irwin’s chili has no beans, no tomatoes, and no onions. He uses a lean cut of beef, usually a top round, cut into large chunks, coats these in a mixture of smoked paprika, crushed leaf oregano, cayenne, and ground cumin, and browns them in a cast iron Dutch oven. For each pound of beef, he soaks, peels and seeds four anchos.
He uses the water from the peppers in the beef, adding more to cover about an inch, and places the heavily-lidded pot in the oven at a low temperature (“Just enough to make it simmer”) in the morning, and by the time the sun gets an angle, the chili must be stirred (“Once is enough”) and returned to the oven for another hour. When men return from the field, the fire is blazing, bottles opened, and a guitar is passed around. He keeps Crystal on the table.
“It’s as good a bowl of red as you’re going to get on this side of the Mississippi,” Irwin says.
We believe, as the wise maintain, that the past is never past because memory lives within us. But we often fail in our efforts to recapture memories, to bring distinct colors and shapes to forgotten images of people and places.
Proust maintained that the past is hidden “somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.” And for Proust, what allowed him to circumnavigate his stubborn intellect and bring back a world where love and life in all their riches were open to his vast and exacting talents, was the taste of a tea cake, a madeleine, which he recognized as the spark that brought life to involuntary memory.
Proust’s recognition of the cake as a trigger has a valid neurological basis. Long-term memories reside in an area of the brain called the amygdala, which is very near the gustatory cortex and the olfactory cortex, the areas of the brain areas in the brain responsible for the perception of taste and smell respectively. The network for processing and feeling emotions, the limbic system, meanders through both areas. Proust’s madeleine initiated a neurological sequence, taste triggering memory, evoking nostalgia, an ache for one’s past, a desire to experience it again, not because it had been so wonderful—for memory does not exclude grief nor trauma–but simply because it had been and is now gone.
This same sequence works for us all of us, whether with a tea cake or those bread-and-butter pickles you found at a county fair that brought back those memories of a house at the end of a long road in the woods with a swing on the porch and an elderly aunt who whistled as she fed her chickens.
Some time ago, I contacted a fellow living in Los Angeles named John Howe for help with an article I was writing. We corresponded for a while, then he said he was going to be driving through Jackson to visit relatives in Tallahassee. We agreed to meet at the grocery store near my home and to decide on a place for lunch.
When I got to the store, John was excitedly running up and down the lunch buffet asking questions about the food. The people in line were smiling at this tall skinny white man with brilliant red hair. I could tell that his excitement over the food they eat every day tickled them, and they happily explained to him what was on the steam table.
“Now, over here is the peas and snaps,” one lady pointed out. “You gotta let them stew a long time for them to be good. And them smothered chops, too, they take a long time.”
“What’s in those bread sticks over there?” John asked.
“That’s Mexican corn sticks,” a fellow in work coveralls said. “They got peppers in ‘em but not hot peppers. They go good with pintos.”
“Are those turnip greens?” John asked.
Somebody barked and said, “No, them’s collards.”
John was stupified by the pile of fried chicken. “Do you sell all that?” he asked the lady behind the counter.
“Oh, this is our second batch,” she said. “We make one in the morning for the folks who come in for breakfast.”
“Fried chicken for breakfast!” John’s mouth was literally dropping to his chest.
“Yessir,” she said. “And we got another batch frying now ‘cause we always have a bunch of people coming in during the afternoon to pick some up to take home.”
After his turn to be served, John joined me at the booth under the window. He had two Styrofoam containers full. One contained Fried chicken—a breast and a leg—with peas and snaps, lima beans, and a cornbread muffin. The other plate had smothered chops with rice and gravy, green beans with sliced potatoes, and Mexican corn sticks. He also paid extra for a side of stewed cabbage and a container of peach cobbler. When he sat down, he opened the containers and sat looking at them and smiling.
“I wanted to get three plates,” he said, “But I thought better of it. I want to get to Atlanta before dark, and I didn’t want to have to stop and eat.” Tell me about their breakfasts. Grits and fried chicken? I never thought of it.”
“Two kinds of grits,” I said, “white and yellow, and they offer two kinds of bacon, curly and flat, link, patty, and smoked sausages, scrambled eggs, and pan after pan after pan of buttermilk biscuits.”
John was smiling and shaking his head. “You know, Jesse, when I stopped in Abeline I pulled up information on the restaurants here, you know, those, ‘top listed’ and ‘most recommended.’ I even went to the local tourism and social media sites looking for a place that told me I was in Jackson, Mississippi.”
“I really didn’t see any,” he said. “I found some white tablecloth places serving the same things you find in L.A.:, liver pâté, osso buco, burgers with Tillamook cheddar, Japanese beef filets and piccatas out the ass.”
He looked at the people standing in line. “But here is where people should come to eat when they’re in Jackson. This place, these people, this f! It’s magical.”
When John returned to L.A. (he flew back), he wrote and thanked me again for “taking him to lunch.” I pointed out that I had merely met him at a grocery store, and that he had paid for the food. “But you brought me to a place I never knew existed. I learned. That’s what going somewhere is all about. Otherwise you’re just dragging the same stuff around all over the place.”
When you’re the wife of a football coach, you often have to feed a crowd that includes a lot of big guys, and if you’re the wife of Johnny Vaught, you want a Southern recipe that everybody loves. Such is the case with Brunswick stew, a favorite dish for gatherings in the South since Daniel Boone barged through the Cumberland Gap.
Johnsie’s recipe lacks the game meats many consider requisite for a Brunswick, and the inclusion of pasta and rice would likely by that same crowd constitute nothing short of heresy. But her 10 yard stew is typical of those often sold for a dollar a bowl for fund-raising at small-town events—such as football games—in the rural South of her day to provide new uniforms or equipment either for the school’s sports teams or marching band.
By my reckoning, this hefty, carb-heavy recipe could easily feed either 25 people or the Rebel offensive line at one sitting.
1 large hen 1 lb. lean ground beef 1 lb. lean ground pork ½ lb. butter 1 large bottle catsup 2 cans tomatoes 2 cans peas (green) 2 cans corn (cream style) 1 package spaghetti 1 cup rice ½ bottle tabasco Salt and pepper to taste
Cook hen until tender, remove from broth, skin and bone, chop the meat. Return chicken to broth, add beef and pork. Cook for about 30 mins. Add butter, catsup, tomatoes, and simmer 1 hr. Then add spaghetti and rice. Cook 1 hr. Add peas and corn, being careful it doesn’t stick. (Note: cans are 15 oz., 16 oz. pkg. spaghetti)
